From Dr. Becky.
A huge goal for astrophysics is to work out whether Earth is special or not. Are there other Earth-like rocky planets out there with thick atmospheres and life giving oceans, just the right distance from their stars so they’re not too hot and not too cold for life to flourish? Or did we just win the cosmic lottery? All our hopes of answering this are currently on the James Webb Space Telescope, and in particular a lot of excitement has swirled around the TRAPPIST-1 system, a star 40 light years away with 7 known planets orbiting it, all of which are similar in size to Earth, and with 4 of those planets in the “habitable zone” where the amount of light from their star would mean a temperature that’s not too hot and not too cold for life as we know it to exist there. And finally, after a 3 year wait, Piaulet-Ghorayeb and collaborators published their paper this month with their work on the atmosphere of TRAPPIST-1d on the edge of the habitable zone around its star, and its not the news we were hoping for. It doesn’t look like it has an atmosphere like Earth’s, and while Piaulet-Ghorayeb and collaborators ruled out a few possibilities of what it could be like, we still don’t know for sure what the atmosphere actually is…
There’ll be more on this system of planets in this month’s Night Sky News episode for September as just this week two papers were published with JWST data on TRAPPIST-1e, the next planet in the habitable zone.
Espinoza et al. (2025) – https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf42e
Glidden et al. (2025) – https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf62e
Piaulet-Ghorayeb et al. (2025) – https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adf207
Krissansen-Totton et al. (2024; new model for TRAPPIST-1b&e atmopsheres) – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52642-6
Gillon et al. (2017; confirmation of 7 planet system around TRAPPIST-1) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.01424
deWit et al. (2016; HST look at TRAPPIST-1b&c) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.01103
deWit et al. (2018; HST look at TRAPPIST-1d,e,f,&g) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.02250
Zieba et al. (2023; TRAPPIST-1c MIRI data release) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.10150.pdf
Greene et al. (2023; TRAPPIST-1b MIRI data release) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.14849.pdf
00:00 Introduction
02:31 Why there’s so much hype around TRAPPIST-1 system
08:57 What Piaulet-Ghorayeb et al. have found with JWST for TRAPPIST-1d
11:40 What this means for the rest of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system
15:45 Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
